If you’re like me, you’re a terrible planner. Often, I think the end goal may be clear enough, but then I struggle to make progress toward that goal. Recently, for example, I’ve started a new position as a data analyst. Not knowing the best way to get started, I just jumped right in with a brute force method, trying to piece together the puzzle of all the data sources I would be working with in my new role. Part of the reason why that didn’t work was because I hadn’t clearly defined my goals. What was I looking at all these database tables for? What did I hope to learn? Without a clear task, I was just falling down rabbit holes.

This got me thinking about how people set goals. I came across an article on the Ness Labs blog about what it calls PACT goals—Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, Trackable—in contrast to the SMART framework. I liked the sound of it at first; the author’s description struck me as a Stoic way to set goals for yourself, focusing only on what you can control, your own actions and outputs. On closer inspection, though, there’s little new that PACT brings to the table. In this article, I compare PACT goals with the traditional SMART goal, taking its benefits and drawbacks in turn, while discussing what current research has to say about setting and achieving goals.

Benefits

First of all, PACT is short. Four letters is easy to remember. Who has time to go through all five letters of a SMART goal? It’s just too much for a person to bother with. I could use that twenty percent time savings to put my shiny new goal into action. PACT is also catchy and meaningful, as in make a pact with yourself to do something. It’s debatable whether it’s catchier than SMART, although PACT is a synonym for promise or agreement, so semantically, it’s more in the ballpark.

But a catchy acronym isn’t enough—the ideas it represents have to be useful. I think the greatest strength of PACT is to remind us to focus on things that are within our control, one of the core concepts in the ethics of Stoicism. PACT advises the reader to choose simple, repeatable actions that will contribute to reaching their goal.

The article also distinguishes between measuring and tracking goals. The author argues that tracking goals involves less effort than measuring them. Tracking can be as simple as checking a box: yes I did, or no I didn’t. I disagree that there’s any significant difference between the two. If part of my SMART goal is to write three hundred words per day, and I write 260 today, that data is easily both trackable and measurable by the author’s definitions. Research does suggest that measuring (or tracking) goal progress does help improve outcomes, and the easier it is to track a goal, the more likely people are to do it (Harkin et al., 2016), although more difficult goals are also more difficult to track (Chang et al., 2017). In other words, simplicity does have its advantages when it comes to monitoring goal progress, so the Ness Labs blog is right to advocate for simplicity.

While PACT isn’t really offering anything distinctly new for setting goals, the author does point out an important aspect of learning: focusing on process, not product. In A Mind for Numbers, Barbara Oakley writes that focusing on the outcome of a goal can actually make it more difficult to reach. To overcome this, we should focus on doing the work, trying not to worry about whether, how, and when it will be done. Just put your head down and keep at it. Even if you don’t achieve the desired result, remember that the results of your actions are often out of your control. In the Bhagavad Gita, perhaps this is one reason why Krishna implores Arjuna to give up the fruits of his actions. It also reminds me of Marcus Aurelius in Meditations, who tells himself to “stick with the situation at hand” and remember that you do have the strength to carry on. Take life (or our goals and projects) one day at a time.

Drawbacks

PACT is catchy, and a whole letter shorter than SMART. But it’s not without its shortcomings. How is PACT different from SMART? Both mention relevance. Both tell you to set a goal you can actually reach. Both also mention keeping track of your progress. However, PACT doesn’t have anything to say about time limits.

Time limits are important. Locke & Latham (2002) demonstrated that deadlines tend to push people to be more productive. Including them in your goal planning can help you plan when to check your progress. The same research also shows that more frequent checking in tends to result in better outcomes.

Time limits are one salient omission from PACT. In fact, however, both goal-setting frameworks fail to address the problem of translating a long-term goal into a short-term action plan, despite the Ness Labs blog author’s claims that PACT solves this problem.

There are two ways to go about this. On one hand, if a goal seems too big, that’s because you haven’t analyzed it deeply enough yet. Neither SMART nor PACT will let you skip that hard initial work, but PACT has one fewer criterion for doing so. We do need to set specific goals so that we know what we’re progressing toward.

Perhaps having fewer tools is acceptable, though. That’s because you might lack even a basic grasp of the area knowledge required to begin an analysis and form a strategy. In this case, rather than trying to come up with a perfect action plan, you could “try the dumbest thing that could work” and iterate from there. Kind of like a grid search: you don’t know how to reach the deepest valley in the region, but the longer you search, the clearer your understanding of the landscape becomes. This is where PACT’s Continuous criterion shines. It’s also the only real difference between it and SMART. Just get started, see how far you get, then experiment based on what you learn. Keep going, and you’ll make a lot of progress.

The iterative approach makes a lot of sense. It reduces the barrier to entry. It also circumvents the common trap of paralysis by analysis. Sometimes, you need to stop thinking about it and just do it. Maybe we could call it the Nike method, though they recently changed their slogan. We could also call it the spaghetti method: throw it at the wall and see what sticks. But if you dive in headfirst like I did at my new job, then you’d better be prepared to iterate. Don’t get attached to a particular way of doing things before you understand what’s going on.

Luckily, it has never been easier to gather information about a goal. Many topics are widely discussed on the internet, so for those of us who aren’t good at planning, ChatGPT and other AI tools are helpful because they can search tens or hundreds of websites and summarize findings within seconds. They even cite academic sources fairly accurately nowadays. Just a few years ago, gathering information about a new goal could have taken hours of searching and reading. Now, you can get a basic overview of anything in seconds without searching at all.

One final catch is that your goal must still be hard enough to challenge you, but not so hard that you give up. Research shows that setting specific, difficult goals yields higher performance (Locke & Latham, 2002). In particular, this highlights one of the potential drawbacks of PACT over SMART: PACT doesn’t explicitly require that we set specific goals. But without a specific goal in mind, we don’t benefit from how it focuses our attention. That focus is what moves us toward goal achievement.

PACT is a catchy way to think about goal setting in terms that a Stoic might find appealing, focusing on your own actions, rather than on external outcomes. In this article, I’ve shown how this isn’t really something exclusive to PACT: the SMART framework can readily be applied in a way that focuses on outcomes within one’s own control. Research on goal setting and tracking shows us that both simplicity and a challenge are important for a good goal. Despite PACT’s shortcomings, it does deserve a tip of the hat for coming up with one more memorable acronym to help people set goals. At least it’s catchy, if not superior or truly new. It’s also a good reminder that any goal worth achieving will take time, effort, and repetition. Practice makes perfect!